Email is a permission-based style of marketing that allows brands to engage consumers with personalized and relevant content. According to a study by ExactTarget, 77 percent of consumers prefer to receive these permission-based marketing communications through email.

Many marketers don’t apply best practices to their campaigns and therefore struggle with low subscriber engagement rates, inactive list members and unsubscribes. These roadblocks can diminish the effectiveness, but we have to keep in mind that the key to successful, high-yield email marketing is a strong email-marketing strategy based on gathered data and analytics.

The development of a detailed email marketing strategy that is continuously optimized can lead to increases in ROI. Without a measured, strategic approach to email marketing, or any content marketing for that matter, you’re simply producing content without data-driven knowledge of its effectiveness, which means you won’t know how—or what—you can improve. Content activation is grounded in analytics and methodology, so email marketing, data and strategy go hand in hand.

Email should be considered one part of a whole content program effort, and should have its own strategy. In the whitepaper, we suggest following six steps to develop and activate your strategy:

Establish business goals and rules

Designate a target audience

Plan a distribution cadence

Observe and optimize content

Maintain lists

Strive for low drop-off

We also call attention to—and explain the importance of—having predetermined benchmarks for content in order to measure and understand what is effective and what is not.

Email can be a strong and hard-working business driver, lead generator and relationship-builder. Pace believes in a holistic email marketing strategy that incorporates a test-and-learn mentality so that you’re continuously optimizing your content and distribution. Email without strategy is often ineffective and will not yield maximum ROI.

For more insights on how you can develop and implement an effective email marketing strategy, we invite you to read the whitepaper.

Jillian Smith – I’m a native of upstate New York and a diehard NY Giants fan, but North Carolina has been my home since 2005. I'm a proud graduate o…MORE

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